Aldo Hoeben's blog

The website has undergone another migration to a fresh new host. Unfortunately things were just not working out for us at mosso, and we're having to move in order to do what we want with the site.

This time our choice is Dreamhost, or more specifically Dreamhost PS. Their services have been tried and tested by the World Wide Panorama project. A big "thank you" to Markus Altendorff for sharing his experience.

At long last, I have implemented an automated system for handling payments from users of the sites becoming a member and/or renewing their membership. Before this, for years, our treasurer was handling each payment manually. This caused (mostly minor) delays, and some confusion among our paying 'customers' (that means you, members!) when payments did not have that 'instant gratification' of getting member privileges.

On januari 19, our then-current webhost Bluehost suspended our website due to 'excessive MySQL use'. All our sites, as well as the mailing lists (so in short, all our means of communicating with our membership) were shut down; a hard to miss 'notice' that we had outgrown the services Bluehost was willing to extend us at our shared hosting.

It's been a while since substantial changes were made to the website. Let me clarify that: Website development has not halted, minor updates happen from week-to-week to keep things running smoothly, but new features have not 'happened' for a while.

'New features for the website?' I hear you ask... A good while back (almost a year ago to be precise), I posted a list of things to add on this blog. Currently the most important big features are an overhaul of the IVRPA mailinglist(s) and forum, as well as an integrated chat system for our member chats.

From time to time I'm getting a message from a user of the site that the site is 'hacked' or sending out spam. In a word, you can rest assured: the site is not hacked. Unfortunately, spam is a sign of the times and there is very little we can do to stop it. I'll take this opportunity to outline ways spam can occur on the site.

The elections for the BoD 2008 are underway (vote now, if you're a current member). Like last year, I have transfered control over the 'admin' user over to our treasurer, who is not running for a position in the Board of Directors. (Major) maintenance will have to wait two weeks, until the elections are over.

Since more than a year ago, I've been meaning to move the IVRPA site over to another host. Today it finally happened. At our old host, we had MySQL issues, we could not host mailinglists, and I was generally worried about the security of the server we were on.

Since around noon GMT, we're on Bluehost.com. Sofar things are looking good over here. Less cruft, and better security all round. Let's hope the performance matches what I've seen sofar.

It's not like I don't have enough to do already, but would there be an interest to have 'our own' digg-like linkdump? Many posts on the forums and blogs on the IVRPA site, but also on the numerous lists are simple 'look what I made' or 'look what I found'-style links with a minimal explanation.

The IVRPA website is running Drupal 4.7. The site has many dependencies on contributed and custom modules, so upgrading to Drupal 5 would not be an light undertaking. Especially with the work I have been putting into the conference site, I would not fathom upgrading at this point.

Mike Quan let me know we have only 90 days left until the conference! Rest assured that we're working overtime (it's 23:09 when I type this) to make the conference work.

I am currently building a registration system for the conference website. I've been 'hacking' away at Drupal, extending the user profiles to hold extra conference information on the subsite. It's not ready yet, but we hope to be able to take your money starting this weekend.